Re: Commitfest problems

On 12/11/2014 01:52 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 01:12:30PM -0800, Joe Conway wrote:
>
>>> Actually, to me it sounds a lot like what we did 10 years ago before
>>> the commitfests except with a way to track the patches (other than the
>>> mail archives) and more people participating in patch reviews.
>>
>> Yes, it does remind me of the mbox files I put on the web.
>
> The whole commitfest process was put in place in part precisely so we
> could get rid of your mboxen. Please let's not get back to that!

Well, the CF process was added for 2 reasons:

1) We were losing track of some patches until integration time, when
Bruce suddently found them in the -hackers archives.

2) In order to give the senior committers some time *off* from reviewing
other people's patches. The idea was to spend 3 weeks or so intensively
reviewing others' patches, and then to have a month (or more) *off* from
working on anything but your own stuff.

While the CFs are still doing (1), support for (2) ended sometime in the
9.3 development cycle. Partly this is because current CFMs are not
permitted to take authoritative steps to ensure that the CF ends on
time, and partly it's because of the increase in big complicated patches
which just don't fit into the CF cycle.

Speaking as the originator of commitfests, they were *always* intended
to be a temporary measure, a step on the way to something else like
continuous integration.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com